Undistracted: On Cinema's Promise of Deep Attention

Julian Hanich (University of Groningen) 

This talk makes a strong case for the continuing importance of the movie theater as a vital cultural practice and social institution. Why? In an age of increasingly scattered attention, cinemas enable film experiences that are more concentrated and focused than many other forms of engagement with moving images.

While some films may be better experienced privately and alone at home, I argue that others are best watched in the public space of the cinema and in the company of others. This is particularly true, I suggest, of challenging modernist art films, slow cinema, experimental and avant-garde films, and related forms.

One phenomenon that leads me to this conclusion is what I call "joint deep attention". Because of its spatial and technological features, the cinema creates conditions that allow us to engage with more challenging films through sustained attention. Yet this is partly enabled by the presence of other viewers: their focused attention can, in a sense, rub off on us, helping us remain concentrated on the film. In this way, the shared experience of attentive viewing can have a beneficial effect on our capacity for attention.

Julian Hanich is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen. He is the author of three monographs: The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience (Edinburgh UP), Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (Routledge) and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: City Girl (Edition Text + Kritik). With Martin Rossouw, he co-edited the award-winning What Film Is Good For: On the Values of Spectatorship (University of California Press) and with Daniel Fairfax he was responsible for the volume The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Munier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions (Amsterdam UP). He is currently directing the research project "Cinematic Beauty: Exploring the Experience of a Major Aesthetic Phenomenon", funded by the Dutch Research Council.